


all in the mind

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Car-Related Injuries, Firework-Related Injuries, Friendship, Gen, Henry Cheng's Pain Tolerance, Kavinsky-Related Injuries, POV Second Person, injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-09
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-10-16 18:25:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10576965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: You’re not really used to people noticing – but then again, you don’t usually get so many opportunities to gethurt.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write something about Henry's pain tolerance and suppression but it didn't come out kinky _or_ dramatic so instead you get #softdreampack and terrible health+safety
> 
> Thanks as always to the charming [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for beta-reading.

It's a series of accidents that give you away. Little things.

 

Your hand, caught in a car door: Skov didn't notice that you were still getting out, and he doesn't now either. He just hears the absence of the 'click' his subconscious has trained him to wait for, and when he turns back, it's confusion not apology on his features. He follows the line of the door back from where he'd flung it, all the way to your withdrawing, crushed-white hand, and even then it takes him a second to get it.

"Shit," he says when he does, "Fuck, Cheng, I didn't know you were still there." It's a scrap of an apology buried in an accusation, since that's how Kavinsky's crew say they're sorry, but you know to take it for what it is.

"Too busy staring at Swan?" you ask him, keeping your voice light, light, light while you drop your arm casually to your side. Blood is rushing deep-purple and pounding hot to the ache in your fingers, and later when you're alone and it's safe, you'll check if they're broken. For now you manage a grin and Skov lets you go with nothing more than a raise of his studded eyebrow.

They’re your ride to school, since the Lichfield carpool no longer chooses to include you. You have to follow them in, take your first class, wait until the first morning break before you can finally flee to a restroom and squeeze your crushed fingers. _There is no danger here,_ you try to tell yourself, but you cannot drown out the rote words in your head, can’t even change the inflection. You have to stare yourself down in the mirror until you’re ready to go back out.

 

A firework that goes off too close, and goes off wrong: it went skidding off across the fairgrounds, shooting sparks before it slammed into you, and of course you’re in chinos, your exposed ankles are your only weakness, and for a second all you feel is heat.

It takes a moment until you can dance-stomp-kick it away, but it’s only the sight of the misfired rocket rolling off across the field that tells you it’s gone; your skin is still screaming like the combustion is stuck there, hot as the universe.

A dozen yards away, the others start laughing, because why wouldn’t they? You looked funny, flailing with your legs, trying to get the detonation away as it seared you. They laugh harder when you retreat to a safer distance, announcing loudly that you’re going to ‘get out of the firing lines’, never mind that you’d never been _in_ them and it’s Skov’s fault for setting the rocket up wrong.

Proko’s the only one who follows you, beer in hand and still chuckling, while you try to very discreetly tip the remainder of your Pabst Blue Ribbon over the burn. It’s not exactly cold water, but Kavinsky’s cooler does not come with non-alcoholic options, and the Henrietta sun has already killed the ice. Cool liquid seemed like the important part of the instruction; if alcohol makes burns worse, you are going to get to find out.

“Did you know one of K’s rockets once blew a guy’s whole hand off?” Proko asks you, with a tone that suggests he’s sharing a humorous fun fact with you. You don’t know how to break it to him.

“I suppose I’m not surprised,” you reply. You have rolled your chinos unfashionably down, and pulled your socks up; not a way you want to be seen, but better than exposing the burn. It is vengefully hot and stinging, and all you can do not to clasp a hand to it. What’s the instruction? Distraction - keep attention away from your weakness. “I don’t believe I’ve _ever_ seen Kavinsky submit his products for federal rating.”

Proko laughs again, and drops down beside you on the dry grass. It’s a terrible place to be playing with fireworks, but you suppose that as with most of K’s hobbies, an inferno is the desired end result.

“His _whole hand_ ,” Proko tells you again, and you watch Skov point a rocket directly at Swan’s face before Swan marches over to smack him, hard, and you keep your hands steady, steady, steady through the sensation of your skin trying to crawl off your ankle. 

 

Broken glass, under your bare foot: that one’s your own fault, for being stupid enough to take your shoes off. The romantic ideal of the overgrown pastures of an abandoned farmhouse, brutally cut down by the remnants of its shattered windows.

Jiang is with you, and has been to places like this before, and knew to wear real shoes and not his usual fluorescent sneakers; when he glances back to see why you’re lagging, you feign interest in the structure, counting your breaths as you feel the sick warmth of blood welling up beneath you. “Look at it sag,” you cry, sweeping broadly with one arm, shifting your weight to try and keep the glass from digging any further into you. “Reclaimed so quickly by the nature man tore down to create it! So little that we build can truly last.”

“Uh-huh,” says Jiang, “Give me the paint.”

You cannot walk to him, and you also cannot throw with aim, so you settle for hurtling Jiang’s cans of paint in his general direction. He gives you the stink eye and, as you’d hoped, circles around to the far side of the farmhouse to find a good wall.

You sink down and tell yourself _measured breaths_ and _pain is only in the mind_ and _it’s not metal so you probably won’t get tetanus_. The glass comes out; if there’s any dirt in the wound, you are not exactly equipped to treat it. You resolve to buy yourself a bottle of disinfectant and a tub of self-care ice cream on the way back. You have to hop your way up to the farmhouse, balance on one foot, the lines of your masterpiece coming out shakier than you’d have hoped.

 _Motherfucking nature,_ you scrawl in one corner. Jiang did a galaxy. Even though it scrapes the sole of your foot something wicked, you have to put your shoes back on before you get blood in the Supra.

 

A car, running over your foot: it’s the least subtle of them, you’ll admit, with everyone but Kavinsky there to see, and Swan kicks the car’s tyres so savagely as it slows back down to see what the problem is. “Fucking hell, Proko!” Swan swears, very loud and very angry, all on your behalf. “How much have you had? Don’t drive if you’re more than fucking buzzed!” He’s waving his arms; it’s quite a lot more noise than you’d expect.

Pain is such a quiet thing for you. Your lips are together, pressed in tight against any whimper that could escape, and Jiang’s nudging you in the ribs, all of you are staring at your foot, still shod in its boat shoe, prognosis indeterminate, a mystery wrapped in soft leather. “I don’t think it’s broken,” you say finally, truthfully, and try to wriggle your toes – agony, but not unbearable. If you can keep your weight off it for a little while, then you should be able to walk on it.

“That’s a tyre mark,” Skov points out, “On your foot.”

Swan kicks Proko’s wheels again; Proko hangs out the driver’s side window to squint at you, definitely not quite present. In all honesty, you don’t think he’s ever been a very good driver. “Sorry,” he says, sincere but faded, and you nod acceptance; the faster you move everyone along, the faster everyone will stop keeping an eye on you, the sooner you can let your expression collapse because your jaw is begging to tremble and you are using up your tricks to keep tears out of your eyes.

You pinch the skin between your forefinger and your thumb, but it’s not enough to distract your brain; another careful flex of your toes show the pain is numbing, shock retreating, you’re going to be fine, just fine, and it’ll only be a shame about your shoe.

“Weren’t we on our way out?” you ask, and you were, and you get to sit in Swan’s passenger seat and follow Proko’s swerving taillights all the way down the road.

 

Later someone tells Kavinsky, “Proko ran over Cheng’s fucking foot,” and you turn too late to see the speaker, to find Kavinsky watching you with faint amusement.

“Did Cheng give a shit?” Kavinsky asks, looking at you with something unreadable in his eyes, some dark concoction of his own making trickling through his veins and making him that bit more unreachable.

Swan answers ‘no’ for you, Skov says ‘Cheng doesn’t give a shit about anything,’ and Kavinsky just keeps looking right through you. It should be disconcerting, but you’ve been Kavinsky-affiliated for a couple of months now, and his shroud of black-magic didn’t work well on you to start with.

That said, you would like him to stop gazing at you quite so directly. “It’s not like he broke it,” you point out fairly. “It’s other motorists I’m concerned about; should you keep saving him from having his license pulled?”

“You think you in that Fisker isn’t a public menace?” he asks, and then you’ve won, topic switched, though you could do without the ten minutes of ribbing that follows. He’s never quite recovered from your Fisker.

It’s fine, though, it’s fine; Proko has a black eye, repayment meted out by Skov on your behalf, and you help him ice it. What they remember later is to stand well clear of Proko in parking lots, a loud and dramatic display, and you are grateful to have, again, escaped their notice.

 

That’s how it’s always been for you. You’re just not really used to people noticing – but then again, you don’t usually get so many opportunities to get _hurt_. At Lichfield house you’d fumble stunts, you would pose too dynamically and slip off your chair, you would twist ankles and sprain things and still actually get hurt, but nothing you couldn’t laugh off, when the other boys were still asking after you.

Now you’re with Kavinsky, who has both a real bullet wound and a tattoo of a bullet wound, and a dogged insistence that he got the tattoo _first_. According to him, the worst part of getting shot was the ridiculous redundancy it created on his skin. He and his friends get _hurt_.

You’re pretty willing to take their friendship anyway. You are very well-equipped to handle pain. It’s just harder to convincingly laugh off.

 

It’s hard to know how much Kavinsky sees – a perk of his shades, you never know what he’s looking at. If his face is turned towards you across a field, does he notice the second when you step on shrapnel, when it drives up through the soft sole of your shoe and into your foot, when you shudder and your expression becomes the glassy, careful stillness it was trained to be? Or is he watching something bigger and better and brighter behind you?

The safe assumption is that Kavinsky knows everything, which is probably what he’s banking on, scourge of the western side of Virginia that he is. He keeps track of so many boys and so many products, he reads people from inside to out and tells them the things about them that they don’t like. You need to assume that he knows you too, even though _known_ isn’t so much the gift of yourself as it is him pulling apart all the sutures of your spine.

“Ways and means, Joey,” you tell him, watching him watch you and wondering whose mask is better. “You have so many of both! What a shame you can’t list all your dealings as extracurriculars and win Aglionby Young Entrepreneur of the Year.”

He snorts, something like fond, and says, “Don’t fucking call me that.” His party burns out around him; you get to watch your own reflection in his eyes, and scrutinise yourself for cracks.

 

And then it’s his hand, cracking across your cheek: two in the morning on the roof of a closed dairy, out in a suburb Skov calls ‘buttfuck nowhere’, stars overhead and the neon of the sign beside you a buzzing, luminant bloat on the owner’s electricity bill. You said – something – careless – rude. Something about _boys like him_ , something demographic, something like what you say all the time, the kind of things the others smack each other around for, but not you.

You’d said your dumb nothing, and you’d laughed, and Kavinsky had made a neat, punctual fist and slammed it into your face.

It was too unexpected, and you were too unprepared. You know your cheek is glowing red and stinging, but the shock of it has you short-circuiting. Training battles the urge to bite your bottom lip and whimper; training wins, barely, and only thanks to the severity of your teacher. You start the count in your head, backwards from ten, but you’ve only gotten to _nine_ when Kavinsky asks, “Does it hurt, Cheng?”

You stare; the others have been silent since Kavinsky hit you, because you don’t get hit like that, because you’re not quite like them. “I,” you say, and you don’t know what to say because _obviously_ it hurts, he knows that as well as you. You just don’t know how to admit it. You attempt middle ground: “I guess?”

“Do you want me to hit you again?” he asks, and you realise you are on very dangerous footing. You should never let yourself forget what Kavinsky is capable of.

“No,” you answer, and then, ash on your tongue, neon hum in your ears, “Yes, it hurts.”

He lowers his fist and says, “Good. Now stick some ice on it like a fucking baby.”

No one carried ice up to the roof, but Proko hands you a beer can that is both mostly cold and good enough, and you press it against your burning cheek while the rest of the crew tries not to stare. Eventually, Skov saves you by saying something newly stupid to break the silence, and Jiang and Swan pick up the conversation to drown him out.

It’s two in the morning, and Kavinsky has his shades on, but you’ve had days where even the faintest bit of light could use some filtering, so you save yourself the danger of calling him out on it. You settle in beside him, still holding the can to your cheek, the sliver of cold it’s providing just enough that you don’t want to take it away. “It’s not something I can switch off.”

“I figured,” he says. You want to know what the glow of his cigarette looks like through his sunglasses; you want to know how angry he’d get if you called him Jojo. “But still; fuck, man. I’ve been shot. Did Proko ever tell you about the guy, with the fireworks?”

“His whole hand,” you offer dutifully.

“That guy did not pretend that his whole hand had not been blown off,” Kavinsky tells you. “He cried like a bitch until his mates bundled him off to the hospital. And you know what?”

You think you can guess at the moral. “They were able to save his hand.”

“ _Fuck_ no. Smithereens. Mince confetti. I think they maybe saved him from sepsis or whatever, but nah, they call him Stumpy now.”

You process that enough to nod, and murmur, “Unfortunate,” and then you pull the beer away from your face so you can drink it. Kavinsky slaps you on the back; Proko and Jiang throw their empty cans off the roof, aiming for a stray cat that skitters away with a hiss. Your cheek is stinging, aching, sore, and it’s going to leave a bruise, and the boys at Litchfield house are absolutely going to see and draw even more conclusions about who you are now.

You don’t think there’s really a moral for you. You hope you never get shot; you are determined never to handle fireworks. Kavinsky’s shades reflect the neon sign and it’s fine, you think, it’s all fine.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! As always I'd love to know what you thought, and you can hit me up on tumblr over [here](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/)


End file.
